The Street of the Cormorant was not far below Clariel’s parents’ house on Beshill and the houses that lined it were almost but not quite as large as her parents’, each being three or four storeys high, with the familiar red-tiled roofs. They also had balconies, but these were on the far side of the street, looking east to the sea.

The house with the sign of the hedgepig was completely different to all the other houses in the street. Clariel saw it before she knew it was her destination, poking up above the red roofs like a tall daisy among a crop of beetroot. It was really a tower, not a house at all, and looked much older than the other buildings around it. It was at least six storeys high, and was built of a dark yellow stone, not faced in white ashlar like almost every other building in Belisaere. The tower was crowned with a crenelated wall surmounted by a cupola room, its roof clad in copper green with verdigris.

‘It’s a guard tower, part of the old wall,’ said Roban, correctly interpreting Clariel’s cricked neck and long stare. ‘From a long time ago, when the city was smaller. There used to be more towers, and a few stretches of the old wall, but most of it has long since been pulled down.’

‘Very sensibly,’ said Valannie. ‘That tower really does not fit in at all with the other houses.’

‘And on that account I am disposed to like it,’ said Clariel. Valannie darted a glance at her that perhaps, if she had not been a servant, might have become a scowl of distaste, but vanished so quickly into her usual, bland, pressed-flat expression that Clariel wasn’t even sure she’d seen it. Perhaps it was just how she imagined Valannie was feeling inside. Seething at having to put up with a yokel mistress who would do nothing to her maid’s credit, not even in taking a conformist line on the city architecture.

There was an iron hedgepig sign, a flat, rusty thing cut from a plate, dangling aslant from two equally rusty chains of unequal length from an iron rod that was set into the keystone of the arch above the house’s front door. Or gate, rather, since in keeping with its origins as a tower, there was a massive, bolt-studded gate of two leaves, together at least twelve feet wide and eighteen high. But there was also a lesser door set within the gate, a sally port perhaps, which was of significantly smaller size, not even high enough to admit someone of average height without stooping. Roban went to this door, and thumped his fist upon it three times, rattling the bolts on the inside.